Case Study: Manufacturing Game, Financial Awareness Programme
Client requirements:
Our client wanted an interactive and engaging Financial Awareness Course to complement a Strategic Awareness Course (also delivered by Clearly Training) for its Regional Sales & Marketing Managers.
Course details:
The courses consisted of two x two day events.
Pre Game Strategy Course:
The delegates were given a fictional scenario based around their business. They were then taught the stages in strategic planning and applied these in teams to the case study. At the end of this two day course each team of delegates had put together a strategic plan for the fictional business.
The final part of the course consisted of each team presenting their strategy to the Chief Executive, Finance Director & Marketing Director of our client UK, who attended for the last hour of the day.
Game details:
The game was played by four teams of 4 players (16 delegates in total) over two days. The courses were run twice to cover all 32 Regional Sales & Marketing Managers.
Each team was responsible for implementing the strategy they had created in the Strategy Module in a competitive game scenario.
They had to make quality decisions, such as the number of staff to employ, quality of materials, range of products and the level of product design costs. They then submitted their decisions to our team who fed them in to our programme to determine their quality level.
The teams then bid against each other to win contracts to supply their products to retail outlets in the UK & Europe.
The teams also had the ability to manage their cash position to make the business more flexible and were faced with the problems of trying to manage receipts from customers and payments to suppliers.
At the end of each round the teams produced a Profit & Loss Account to assess their progress.
Course coverage:
The following technical details were covered throughout the four days:
- Profit & Loss Accounts (Income Statements)
- Balance Sheets
- The Accruals Principle & Depreciation
- Basic interpretation of accounts including Gross & Operating Margins
- The importance of getting the customer offering right
- Cash management & its impact on the business
- The impact of competition in the market
- Budgeting & Budgetary Control
- Basic variance analysis
- Business Strategy
- Preparing reports
- Basic Presentation Skills
Return on Investment:
The initial course feedback from delegates gave a 100% satisfaction rating on the programme’s aims of improving the engagement with Financial Information & understanding strategy formulation.
One key requirement of the client was that their managers understood the language used by strategists and accountants and were confident in using this to communicate with others. In addition, following the courses, it was seen that the delegates were comfortable in their enhanced business roles and the Marketing Director was able to delegate more responsibility to the managers, enabling him to focus on strategic business issues.